From Films to Fiction

Acclaimed director and screenwriter (Holes, The Fugitive, and the Santa Barbara–set Steal Big Steal Little, among others) and Santa Barbara resident Andy Davis has teamed up with American Book Award–winning author Jeff Biggers to write a new novel, Disturbing the Bones, in which they imagine what happens in the final days of a clashing presidential election, when a nuclear weapons incident throws the world into chaos.

Davis and Biggers will launch the novel at two Santa Barbara events on Wednesday, October 16. First, they will be at UCSB’s Interdisciplinary Humanities Center at 4 p.m., and that evening they will be signing books at the Community Environmental Council’s Environmental Hub (1219 State St.) at 7 p.m. 

David Starkey spoke to Davis about his new novel. This interview has been lightly edited for brevity and clarity.

I’d like to start by asking why you, a noted film director, were interested in writing a novel in the first place.

This was an idea I had for a movie a long time ago, and I went back and forth about how to approach it. Then finally I started to write the screenplay, and I found a guy named Jeff Biggers, who’s a wonderful writer who had done a lot of work in a kind of environmental reportage way. He wrote a book called Reckoning at Eagle Creek: The Secret Legacy of Coal in the Heartland about his family’s history in southern Illinois, right across from Cairo, Illinois, where a significant portion of the novel is set. I decided I would use Jeff as a partner to help me write the screenplay, and we started working on it, and I realized I wanted to put so much in the screenplay that it was never going to fit, so I said, “Let’s just write the novel, and then we’ll extract the best of it for the screenplay.”

Any other elements involved in the creation of Disturbing the Bones?

The core of the book comes from two places. One is a movie called The Package, which I made with Gene Hackman and Tommy Lee Jones and Joanna Cassidy, a Cold War thriller. It’s a story about a potential disarmament agreement that the generals don’t want to happen. 

The second thing that inspired me was one of my mentors, a cinematographer named John Weir, who at one time worked for the State of Illinois for the Department of Transportation, and in doing that covered a dig called Koster. It was a very significant archeological find in North America, 26 layers going back 13,000 years. And I thought that would be the basis of a very interesting thriller: And the metaphor was [that] we will be remembered for thousands and thousands of years for what we put in the ground, like our missile silos.

How did it all come together?

I blended the story of Cairo, Illinois — infamous Cairo, near where Dred Scott was imprisoned; it was the southernmost staging ground of the Union army, a place of racial turmoil in the late ’60s and ’70s, where Blacks were boycotting downtown, and the Klan rose up and Nazis came down from Chicago. And then the idea of the Russians who are testing hypersonic missiles, and we monitor them from an Air Force Base near St. Louis.

So, we sort of wove together the story of a young man, Randall, who lost his mother at the age of 14, a Black woman who was a reporter for Ebony magazine who disappeared covering the violence.

We also have this young archaeologist, Molly, who winds up going to Yale under the mentorship of this general who’s basically the villain, and the fact that her grandfather was in the Klan creates great conflict between her and Randall, but then they wind up working together. And all this is happening while we have a heated presidential race in which one of the candidates is an African American woman.

What about the actual composition process of the book? Who did what?

Well, the idea of the story and the characters and the movement and the action was a lot from what I had brought to the table. But Jeff was a real wordsmith. He’s great at writing descriptions and characters, and he understood a lot about the fabric of the people down there. Jeff is just a really bright guy, a really eloquent writer. We’d send drafts back and forth, rewriting each other, and it was a real collaboration.

As a reader and a novelist, I’m always thinking the only thing that matters is whether or not the reader turns the page. Whether it’s Tolstoy, or some avant-garde work, or the latest beach read. But it seems like the thriller is a genre that’s especially demanding in that regard. What was your strategy to keep readers turning to the next page and the next chapter?

I just tried to keep it visual — what are you seeing, and also what are you hearing, and is it moving the story along? And in terms of the backstory and texture, in a movie, that will be done with visuals, and in a novel, you have to write about it, and that’s one of the great contributions Jeff made: describing what we’re seeing in the context of the places. He knew the Cairo, Illinois, stuff more than I, and I know the Chicago stuff.

We live in a very politically divided society. Obviously, that played a big role in Disturbing the Bones.

Absolutely. There were certain right-wing generals who came out and were on Fox News all the time, speaking about the mistakes the president was making. And the Russians are having all these discussions about their atomic weapons.

It all came together in an eerie way. So, you’re thinking that once the book comes out, in the near future it will become a screenplay again?

We have to go back and refresh the screenplay with the best elements of the novel.

Can you mention any actors that you have in mind to play the leads?

For the Randall character, the Chicago cop, the obvious choice would be Denzel Washington. Emma Stone would be good as the archaeologist. And Tommy Lee Jones would be great as the general. How’s that work for you?

I think you’ve got yourself a hit.

For more information on Disturbing the Bones, see andrewdavisfilms.com/disturbing-the-bones.